A quick glance over any urban skyline will reveal a large number of multi-story and high-rise buildings. Most of these multi-unit buildings, such as office buildings and apartment buildings have various electric or electronically controlled facilities, such as the elevator(s), the security doors and the emergency warning alarm system. Although generally designed with safety concerns in mind, these facilities often hinder emergency service personnel who are called to respond to an emergency at the building.
Until the present, there has been no successful attempt to facilitate the rapid access of emergency services personnel into such office and apartment buildings. Rather, the security doors and elevators typically slow down emergency response time to the incident.
For example, an emergency service unit responding to an incident at such a building must request the security door to be opened which quite often absorbs a lot of time for any number of reasons. Once past the security door, the emergency personnel must wait for the elevator to come to the ground floor, which again can absorb a lot of precious time, especially in some of the larger office towers in the large urban centres. These delays have been found to be between three and twenty minutes.
There thus exists a need for a system which could be used by emergency services personnel to provide automated rapid access into the building and to the building facilities for a limited period of time, after which the facilities would return to their normal operating state.
A further requirement is for there to be a universal means of accessing the building facilities at a number of different buildings. Rather than requiring emergency personnel to carry an assortment of keys, access codes or the like, it is desirable to have a single, universal alternative which emergency personnel can use at any building within the assigned territory for those personnel to access the facilities of those buildings.